


Why I Hate the Desert

by Deannie



Series: The Losers' Tour Book [4]
Category: The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: Community: hc_bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 17:57:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2318240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I’m not surprised that he and I got together as quickly as we did, but at times like this, I curse it. It would be easier if I thought he was allowed to die. But no one I care about is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why I Hate the Desert

**Author's Note:**

> For the hc_bingo prompt: blood loss

Jensen is not allowed to be dead.

We are set up in one of the abandoned barracks and the colonel is pacing beside me as we wait for Roque and Pooch to return from their recons. I don’t pace. It won’t change anything and I will save my energy for when it’s needed. For when we find Jensen and I can beat the hell out of him for scaring us all.

“I got nothing, Colonel.” Pooch grumbles as he pushes his way through the fabric that covers the doorway. I hear my own anger and frustration mirrored there. “You’d think a crazy blond white guy with an AK would attract a little more attention in a place like this.”

It has been more than a day since the firefight that scattered us to the winds and it appears Jake Jensen is a ghost of our own minds, at least from the locals’ point of view. We have each spent the day canvassing a different area surrounding the settlement. So far, we’ve come up empty.

When we were dropped in Abyei, our orders were clear: rout out the terrorist cell working out of the desert near Antilla, to the north. The actual execution, of course, was messy. Very messy. And prolonged. It was nearly six hours before we realized he was missing.

Six hours where anything could have happened. Except him dying, because he’s not allowed to do that.

> Clay had been out of breath over our secure channel. “Losers, give me twenties.”
> 
> I looked around at the featureless desert and resisted the urge to tell the boss that I was in butt-fucking Egypt. I wasn’t, but I did feel like I had been running long enough and hard enough to get there. The terrorist training camp had done its job well and its students fought like demons before we started blowing parts of it up. They took exception. And they took flight.
> 
> I pulled out the GPS unit Jensen had insisted each of us carry. It seemed like a useless toy when he handed them out, but I was actually glad of it and its preloaded satellite map as I rattled off my location.
> 
> “Holed up in an abandoned house about a quarter mile north of the hot zone,” Pooch replied.
> 
> “Right beside him,” added Roque.
> 
> The silence stretched too long after that, and I could sense the team holding its breath. Or maybe that was me.
> 
> “Jensen, what’s your twenty, soldier?” the Colonel had asked, worry too plain in his voice.

Twenty-eight hours later, and we’re still waiting for an answer. A body. Anything. It’s like he disappeared into the sands.

Roque whips the fabric door to the side so violently that it nearly comes off the rod as he stomps in. He doesn’t like things going wrong. Losing Jensen definitely qualifies.

“Most of the bodies have disappeared—been claimed for burial,” he reports. “He ain’t there.”

It’s a small mercy, but one I’ll take at the moment.

Roque shakes his head. _Ever the optimist,_ as Jensen would say. “Clay, you know half the camp is blown to hell. There’re places where—”

“Where Jensen isn’t,” Clay responds coldly. For which I thank him.

“All right,” he says, fixing each of us with a gaze that says he wants us to suck it up and forget who it is we’re looking for so we can concentrate on finding him. “We go in twos. Roque, you and Pooch sweep south. Cougar and I are north. Five clicks out and back again. We meet here and start spiraling clockwise from there.”

Roque grits his teeth. “Fucking needle in a haystack.”

“He’s our needle,” Clay says tightly. “Find him.”

* * * * *

Clay and I are three clicks out and we have seen nothing.

“Kid better have a damn good reason for disappearing,” Clay mutters. I don’t bother to point out that there are only a few reasons he could possibly have, and all of them are bad. There’s no point. The colonel knows, and there’s nothing we can do about it except keep searching.

My thoughts wander with only sand and more sand to occupy my eyes.

He’s a strange man, Jake Jensen. I was surprised to meet him when the Colonel put the team together eighteen months ago. At first glance, he fit in slightly better than a drunken zebra. At second glance, I began to wonder what the boss was thinking, putting him in with a band like us.

The colonel and Roque are career black ops; Roque maybe more hard-core than Clay, but neither of them is innocent. Pooch is simply as laid back as he appears and as deadly as the rest of us. And I have learned that there’s no point in wasting energy on things that don’t deserve the effort, no use in dwelling on things that are best left untouched. I speak when there is something worth saying and save myself for important things. Like my team. Like Jake.

He, on the other hand, is a ten-year-old boy hopped up on pixie sticks. With a degree from MIT. And, yes, the ability to take a man down in less than forty-five seconds, with gun, fist, or blade—but that’s not particularly remarkable for a special forces officer. What is remarkable is his reluctance to actually kill unless he has to. And the fact that I often fear he’s just an adrenaline junkie in this for the rush. All said, he’s a unique blend that definitely adds a little spice to the mix.

I’m not surprised that he and I got together as quickly as we did, but at times like this, I curse it. It would be easier if I thought he was allowed to die. But no one I care about is.

“Don’t be dead, Jensen,” I hear Clay whisper, showing that he can still feel the fear that I do. “Just don’t be dead.”

“...alk—fro… …—eat, this is—”

Clay and I freeze at the stream of static and nonsense from our radios. We'd both know that voice anywhere. Clay brings his radio up to his mouth. “Jensen, report!”

“—olonel. Rad— ... to hell… —ive clicks north… hole—”

Five clicks north. We start walking again, Clay never letting go of his radio while I scan the area around us for hostiles and Jensen.

“...ping rece—tion gets… closer you are…”

“Where are you, soldier?” Clay asks, watching the endless sand around us. “We’re coming up on five clicks north. Give me a landmark.”

“Um, sand?” The radio is clearing as we move, and I can hear the sarcasm in his voice. And the pain. “Look… dead guys in… made a burrow…”

He’s hurt. He would’ve found a place to hide from the sun, a place to wait until we found him. I look north for a sand berm, a dune…

A couple of dead guys in robes.

“Colonel,” I call quietly, pointing to two bodies lying at the base of a six-foot dune about half a mile east of us. We run and Clay doesn’t bother using the radio now.

“JENSEN!”

“—ight here, boss,” comes weakly over my radio, clearer than anything else has been. The bodies, when we reach them, are impressively mangled. We didn’t have grenades on us, so Jensen must have taken it off of them.

I clamber up the dune and start looking. Clay takes a little longer to climb the height, but he finds Jake first.

“Shit, Jensen,” he gripes quietly as I approach. “The hell did you do to yourself, kid?”

Jensen is curled up in a small hole dug in the dune. With him lying on his right side, I can see that the left thigh of his pants is covered in blood with a badly tied field dressing doing a poor job of stopping the bleeding. He looks up at me and gives me a grin, but he is too pale beneath his sunburn and his eyes are too dull.

He isn’t sweating. Blood loss and dehydration are a deadly combination. But not today.

“Not… good enough to shoot myself in the leg with a rifle, sir,” he tells Clay drunkenly. I try to hand him my canteen and he tries to wave it off. He’s clutching his radio in his right hand, but it looks like it took a hit at some point—possibly while it was in his hand, as his left index and ring fingers are clearly broken. I guess I can’t yell at him for the crap job on the bandage.

“Drink,” I tell him quietly, letting him see in my eyes that I will shove the canteen into his mouth and force the water down his throat if he doesn’t do it.

He wisely takes the canteen, his breath coming in disturbing pants. “Jesus, Coug. Bossy much?” His hand is shaking too much to drink. Damn it. I pour water into his mouth and watch him fight not to choke on it.

“Let’s get you out of there and back to base,” Clay says, trying to pull Jensen up by brute force alone. I don’t think he can stand at this point. It’s not just the rifle shot. He’s been in there too long.

“What happened?” I ask, grabbing him under the arms and pulling. His legs stay cramped in position for a long moment and he yelps in pain as gravity straightens them for him. The wound bled too much. His right pant leg is soaked with it, too, but there’s no wound there, only run off from the other. I lay him down flat and he tries and fails to take a deep breath.

“Usual,” he says shortly. Jensen is never brief. Ever. “Terrorists, guns, running, blowing things up.” He looks at me curiously for a moment as I pull out another field dressing to try to stop him losing any more blood—if he even has the moisture in him to bleed at this point. “Why are there two of you?”

Clay kneels down next to us and gets into Jensen’s line of sight. “Jake, how many fingers am I holding up?”

Jensen gives him an irritated look. “Three,” he guesses correctly. “I meant, where are Pooch and Roque?”

Clay reaches for his radio—which suddenly blares to life.

“Colonel, we have aircraft incoming!” Roque is pissed. “Looks like they’re homing in on what’s left of the settlement. Tell me you’re not there.”

I stand and look over the dune, to the south. Five specks in the sky are growing closer. Shit. Probably the South Sudanese. They won’t wait to confirm the training camp is destroyed. They’ll just fire bomb the whole place. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.

“Get clear!” Clay barks into his radio. I look back and he’s leaning over Jensen, as if he can cover him from an aerial attack. If we’re lucky, we’re too far out from the base to get caught in the fire storm. If we’re not, it’s too late anyway. “Bury yourselves in the god damned sand if you have to, but you two keep safe until it’s over. We have Jensen. Don’t make me come looking for you, too!”

“I read you, Clay,” Roque says grimly. “We’re four clicks south of the camp and digging in.”

“Understood,” Clay says. “Cougar, get your head down, damn it.”

As if I need the reminder. I hover low at the top of the dune, watching the strike team come in. The lead plane starts its run and I turn and slide down toward Clay and Jensen. The first explosion rocks the sand around us, filling in part of Jensen’s hole and covering him in a fine dusting.

“More blowing stuff up, huh?” he says, too quietly. His skin is beet red where it isn't almost gray and all of it is dry as paper. I put the canteen to his lips and he drinks, but immediately looks sick.

“Don’t throw up,” I tell him, rolling him on his side in case he does.

He glares at me, but the water stays in. “What are you, my mother?” he asks irritably. “Scratch that. Mom would just leave me to choke on it.” He closes his eyes, his breath coming in shorter and shorter pants. “I feel really shitty, Coug.”

Another barrage of firepower—closer this time—has Clay up and looking carefully over the dune. After a long moment, he nods and slides back down to us. “I think we’re far enough away,” he says, confirming my own thoughts. He turns to Jensen. “Let me take a look at—Jensen?”

I turn away from the smoke to the south, and look down. Jensen is still panting, but it’s shallower than before, faster.

“Jensen, come on, kid,” Clay says quietly, patting Jake’s face hard. “Jensen, you fucker, wake up!”

The next bombs drop even closer to us and Clay and I both fold ourselves over to cover Jake.

He is not allowed to die. I thought he knew that.

“Group… hug? … thought that was my thing.”

Clay and I both sit up and look down at hazy blue eyes and a too disoriented grin.

“Kid,” Clay whispers. “Scare me like that again, I’ll bust you down to private.”

“Don’t do that, sir,” Jensen whines weakly. “Then Cougar would be giving _me_ orders.”

“He does that anyway,” the colonel says, ducking his head in reflex as the fourth plane drops its load farther from us. He rises to check on where the payload landed. “Got you wrapped around his little finger.”

“Like hell, sir,” Jensen mutters. To twist the knife—because it is actually true—I hold up my pinky. He reaches out for it with his left hand and cries out as his fingers try to curl around mine. “Shit!”

“Keep still, _mi loco_ ,” I tell him, carefully taking his hand. I can set the fingers here, I think—just tape them to each other—but it’s going to hurt. A lot. His pinky is dislocated, too. It’s too much damage to be from the hit his radio took—or too little. If they shot that out of his hand, they’d’ve taken half the hand with it.

“Seriously?” he says, trying to muster more power. “Your crazy one?”

What?

"That’s what you’re going to call me?” He lays back, closing his eyes. “I mean, I knew the nicknames were going to start at some point, but ‘crazy one’?”

I think through what I’ve said and sit back with a smile as I realize what I called him. _Mi abuela_ told me when I was young that family names—nicknames—come from who a person really is. You cannot think them up, they just come.

“Sounds about right,” Clay says, crouching back down next to me. He nods to the smoke behind us. “Number four went just east of the settlement—” A blast too close to us has us both leaning over Jensen again as the dune threatens to slide down on us.

“And there’s number five,” Jensen croaks quietly. “Are we done now?” He shoves at me with his right hand. “Show me your GPS.” I reach into my pocket and hold the large box out to him. “ _Show_ it to me,” he says again, and I remember he only has one useful hand. I hold it still as he pokes at it and settles back in triumph. “Pooch and Roque,” he says, gesturing at the screen. There are two flashing lights in our position and two about five-and-a-half miles south, beyond the satellite image of what used to be a terrorist camp.

“I didn’t know they could do that.” Clay sounds mildly pissed. It would have been nice to know. Although…

“Why are there only two here?” I ask, echoing Jensen’s question from earlier.

“Oh,” he says, still panting and white-faced. “It sort got shot out of my hand." That explains the fingers. "I might have used what was left as a detonator to blow up the C4 I stole.”

Clay chuckles. “DIdn’t know they could do that, either.”

“Everyone hates a unitasker, sir.” Jensen closes his eyes again, and I can see that the blood loss and dehydration are going to pull him down again, now that we are here. He still needs medical attention—quickly—but I am less worried that he will break the rules and die on me.

“Hey Colonel!” Roque’s voice comes over the radio and he sounds hyped up from the action. “You all survive the fireworks?”

Yes, I think, sending up a prayer of thanks.

“Think Pooch could find something that has wheels and hasn’t been blown up yet?” Jensen slurs without opening his eyes. “Think we should leave. I hate the desert.”

“I do, too, kid,” Clay tells him, patting his shoulder. It’s funny that I would never have thought of Colonel Clay as a sentimental man when I first met him. “We’re good,” he replies. “Gonna need some help, though.”

“Pooch is hunting for transport now, sir,” Roque reports, causing Jensen to smile. “Wish Jensen had come up with a way to track each other when he gave us these stupid ass GPS things."

"Yeah, why didn't I think of that?" Jensen mutters sarcastically. He's barely conscious and still talking. It's almost impressive when it isn't totally annoying.

Clay looks at Jensen and smirks as he clicks his radio back on. "We'll ask him when he comes to. For now, head due north from your current location. We’ll hear you coming.”

“...was mean, sir,” Jensen murmurs. He lifts his gut-shot radio weakly. “I’d explain how to do it, but, you know. Radio broken.” He sighs as much as his panting will let him. “Sorry.”

I gesture to the colonel for his canteen and toss my empty one aside.

“Drink.”

Jensen glares at me as much as he is able. “You know, threatening me like that? Not the way to get what you want.” I simply stare back. “Fine. Fine,” he grumbles, more like a ten-year-old than usual. He opens his mouth and lets the water slide down his throat.

“I’m never gonna understand you two,” Clay mutters. “Thank God.”

There’s nothing to understand. Jake drifts off and I know that he’ll drift back again later. Because we are here.

I check the bandage and it looks like the bleeding’s stopped. Clay is watching over my shoulder.

“He’ll make it to Antilla?” Clay asks. There’s no way he’ll make it all the way back to Abyei. Antilla is disputed, but we can find a place to hole up and keep him going long enough for extraction.

“He’ll make it,” I say confidently. He has to. “He is not allowed to die.”

Clay looks down at Jensen and sees the same injuries I do. He claps me on the back. “I sure hope _he_ knows that.”

“Headed around the kill zone to, hopefully, your location.” Pooch sounds eager. It will be good to have the team together, finally. “How’s J?”

Clay and I exchange a look, and he grins. “He’ll make it. Just get your asses up here and let’s get the hell out of this desert.”

“Affirmative, sir,” Pooch replies. “I could get to hate the desert.”

Jensen snorts lightly. “I already do.”

* * * * *  
the end


End file.
